Although Orkut is less popular in the United States than competitors Facebook and MySpace, it is one of the most visited websites in India and Brazil. In fact, as of December 2009, 51.09% of Orkut’s users are from Brazil, followed by India with 20.02% and United States with 17.28%.

Originally hosted in California, in August 2008 Google announced that Orkut would be fully managed and operated in Brazil, by Google Brazil, in the city of Belo Horizonte. This was decided due to the large Brazilian user base and growth of legal issues.

As of June 2010, Alexa traffic ranked Orkut 63rd in the world; the website currently has more than 100 million active users worldwide. Anyone of age above 13 years can join orkut.

Buzz enables users to choose to share publicly with the world or privately to a group of friends each time they post. Picasa, Flickr, Google Reader, YouTube, Blogger, FriendFeed, identi.ca and Twitter are currently integrated. The creation of Buzz was seen by industry analysts as an attempt by Google to compete with social networking websites like Facebook and microblogging services like Twitter.Buzz also includes several interface and interaction elements from other Google products (e.g. Google Reader) such as the ability to “like” a post.

Google executive Sergey Brin said that by offering social communications, Buzz would help bridge the gap between work and leisure, but the service and its rollout have been strongly criticized for taking insufficient account of privacy concerns.

The site was initially launched as an invitation-only service, although at one stage, accounts were also available to users of the Flock web browser. However, accounts can now be registered by anyone, and there are over 10.6 million individual blogs with the service as of April 2010.

Other Information

• Type of site : Blog hosting
• Registration : Optional
• Owner  : Automattic
• Created by  : Automattic

Chitika offers search-targeted advertising solutions. The ad units can be used on websites alongside with Google AdSense or as an AdSense alternative.

Other Information

• Type : Private
• Industry : Internet advertising
• Founded : Shrewsbury, Massachusetts (May, 2003)
• Headquarters : Westborough, Massachusetts, USA
• Key people :
  • Venkat Kolluri, Co-Founder, CEO
  • Alden DoRosario, Co-Founder, CTO
• Products : Chitika Premium

Notable changes include the addition of related searches (called “Explorer pane” on the left side of search results), based on semantic technology from PowerSet, a search company Microsoft purchased in 2008, search suggestions as you type, and the ability to keep track of your search history.

Name origin

The word “bing” is onomatopoeic. It typically represents a sound of arrival or conclusion, such as the sound made when an elevator arrives. Microsoft indicated that the name Bing “was memorable, short, easy to spell, and that would function well as a URL around the world” and reminded people of the sound made during “the moment of discovery and decision making.” Steve Ballmer recently revealed in an interview with Wired magazine that his original inspiration for the name came from the character Chandler Bing from the popular US sitcom “Friends”.

Qi Lu, president of Microsoft Online Services, also announced that Bing’s official Chinese name is bì yìng (simplified Chinese: 必应; traditional Chinese: 必應), which literally means “very certain to respond” or “very certain to answer” in Chinese.

While being tested internally by Microsoft employees, Bing’s codename was Kumo, which came from the Japanese word for spider as well as cloud, referring to the manner in which search engines “spider” Internet resources to add them to their database, as well as cloud computing.

Beyond the original word-search capability, Google Search provides more than 22 special features, such as: weather forecasts, time zones, stock quotes, maps, earthquakes, movie showtimes, airports, home listings, sports scores, etc. There are special features for numbers: prices; money/unit conversions (“10.5 cm in inches”); calculations ( 3*4+sqrt(6)-pi/2 ); package tracking; patents; areas codes; plus rudimentary language translation of displayed pages.

A Google search-results page is ordered by a priority rank called “PageRank” which is kept secret to avoid spammers from forcing their pages to the top. Google Search provides many options for customized search, such as: exclusion (“-xx”), inclusion (“+xx”), alternatives (“xx OR yy”), and wildcard matching (“*”).

From the Website

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

As a first step to fulfilling that mission, Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed a new approach to online search that took root in a Stanford University dorm room and quickly spread to information seekers around the globe. Google is now widely recognized as the world’s largest search engine — an easy-to-use free service that usually returns relevant results in a fraction of a second.

When you visit www.google.com or one of the dozens of other Google domains, you’ll be able to find information in many different languages; check stock quotes, maps, and news headlines; lookup phonebook listings for every city in the United States; search billions of images and peruse the world’s largest archive of Usenet messages — more than 1 billion posts dating back to 1981.

What’s a Google?

“Googol” is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, “Mathematics and the Imagination” by Kasner and James Newman. Google’s play on the term reflects the company’s mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web.

Other Information

• Type :  Public
• Founded : Menlo Park, California (September 4, 1998)
• Founder(s) : Sergey M. Brin, Lawrence E. Page,
• Headquarters : Googleplex, Mountain View, California, United States
• Area served : Worldwide
• Key people : Dr. Eric E. Schmidt, Ph.D. (Chairman) & (CEO) Sergey M. Brin (Technology President),  Lawrence E. Page (Products President)
• Industry : Internet, Computer software

Contact Information

• Google Inc.
  1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
  Mountain View, CA 94043
  Phone: +1 650-253-0000
  Fax: +1 650-253-0001

Cuil’s privacy policy, unlike that of other search engines, says it does not store users’ search activity or IP addresses

Cuil is managed and developed largely by former employees of Google: Anna Patterson, Russell Power. The CEO and co-founder, Tom Costello, has worked for IBM and others. The company raised $33 million from venture capital firms including Greylock.

Name

The Irish ancestry of Anna Patterson’s husband Tom Costello sparked the name Cuil, which the company states is taken from a series of Celtic folklore stories involving a character called Finn McCuill. The company says that Cuil is Irish for knowledge and hazel.

Some linguists are unsure of this derivation and pronunciation, and note that the modern Irish word for hazel is spelled coll (coill or cuill in genitive form, the former spelling having superseded the latter as a result of the Caighdeán Oifigiúil reforms of the mid-twentieth century). Foras na Gaeilge, the official governing body of the Irish language, doubted the assertion that ‘cuil’ means ‘knowledge’. “I am unaware myself of the meaning ‘knowledge’ being with the word ‘cuil’ in Irish,” Stiofán Ó Deoráin, an official on Foras na Gaeilge’s terminology committee, said.

The company name had previously been spelled Cuill.

Launch

Cuil’s launch (with an index of 121,617,892,992 web pages) received widely critical press coverage. Concerns were expressed about the website’s slow response times, irrelevant or wrong search results and in at least one case, inappropriately pornographic images displayed alongside search results. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch questioned the validity of Cuil’s claim that it had the world’s largest search engine index and criticized it for focusing on size rather than relevance. Despite reported problems with search results, Net Applications reported that for the last three days of July, Cuil beat Google and Yahoo in the amount of time spent on a site after referral from a search engine, a key metric for relevancy of search results.

According to an interview with a Cuil representative, while other Web 2.0 launches using massively parallel processing might fail with a slow down or crash, Cuil’s architecture was responding with incomplete, “less-than-relevant results that then appear at the top of users’ pages.” Cuil’s VP of communications Vince Sollitto said the search engine was experiencing heavy first-day overloads and they were “busy putting out fires.” Sollitto said Cuil “will only improve with time. It’s day one. Traffic is massive. We’re new. There are bugs to fix, results to improve.”

After the initial critical press coverage Cuil was alleged to have caused issues for some websites, owing to how the Cuil indexing robot polled certain sites. Website owners were reportedly saying the method was not “scientific in any way” and “actually quite ‘amateurish.’”

According to the Alexa web information company, the site reached a peak of just over 0.2% of worldwide internet users in late July 2008 and by September 12, 2008, it had dropped to 0.02% and ranked as the 5,340th site by traffic. By October 13, 2008, it had dropped to 0.005% and ranked as the 21,960th site in traffic. About one month after launch, Cuil’s Product VP and renowned search technologist, Louis Monier, quit the company citing disagreements with the CEO, Tom Costello.

Criticism

Since launch, Cuil’s search results tend to display seemingly random images. This was noticed by several bloggers. Even months after its launch, incorrect images appear with some web sites as they did at launch. A Gmail logo is still shown for a blogging site, TechCrunch.

Contact Information

• Type of site  search engine
• Available language(s)  English
• Owner  Cuil, Inc.
• Launched  July 28, 2008

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